Page:Between the twilights being studies of Indian women by one of themselves (IA betweentwilights00soraiala).pdf/185

Rh walls shut them in securely, shut them in with their broodings and bemoanings, with the intrigues and loyalties of their several waiting-women, and with one gray-white Sarus, the red-throated, a ghost-bird, walking restlessly on his high stilts from courtyard to courtyard.

I saw the solitary creature first in the cow-dust hour before the stars come out, and he seemed to me somehow the embodiment of that quarrel, the lost soul of the inharmonious.

I have said the quarrel was in three generations—daughter, mother, grandmother—and, of course, like all Raj quarrels, it had been made by a third person to suit his own purposes. My connection with it was an attempt at Peacemaking, when the daughter was about fifteen, and could speak for herself. Not soon shall I forget my journeys … flat, mud-coloured country, with mud huts rising out of the ground, as if you had pinched up the earth into hiding holes … mud-coloured humans like detached pieces of their own houses herding undersized goats, or urging miserable beasts and an unwilling plough over the baked earth: little vegetation, but here